


Crickets and Kobolds

by De_Nugis



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-21
Updated: 2011-09-21
Packaged: 2017-10-23 22:25:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/255712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/De_Nugis/pseuds/De_Nugis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>negotiating with kobolds</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crickets and Kobolds

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a "stuck in a cave" prompt for the schmoop lightning challenge at silverbullets.

In hindsight, getting his hallucination-prone, caged-for-nearly-two-centuries brother trapped underground with things he can’t see may not have been Dean’s best move.

“I’m fine,” says Sam at his shoulder.

That’s never a good sign. Dean can’t stop and figure out just how fucked up _fine_ means this time because they have to keep pace with the kobold. It’s dodging ahead of them, probably leading them into a trap. Following it is a stupid-ass plan, except for how it makes more sense than camping in the dark by the cave-in with Sam freaking out and waiting to starve to death.

Sam brushes at the air in front of his face like he’s sweeping away cobwebs. The light from the kobold’s lantern barely reaches them, but Dean can see the sheen of sweat on his forehead. When his foot sends a pebble skittering he starts and shies like a horse. Dean grabs his arm. They stumble on. The passage widens suddenly into a vaulted natural chamber, dark water running through a channel on one side, and, yep, trap. The cavern is full of kobolds, knobbly limbs and leather aprons and a gleam of eyes in the pale greenish light from their lanterns. Sam takes one look at them and flattens himself against the wall, panting, an arm flung over his eyes.

“You seeing them now?” Dean whispers. Kobolds are close enough to fairies Dean can see them, ugly ass little things, but not really scary. So far they’ve been as invisible to Sam as they are to the miners struggling with broken machinery and inexplicable cave-ins and ore gone corrosive as acid.

“I see fire,” says Sam.

Fuck. Lore says that kobolds can appear as flames, figures they’d do it for the guy who burned over and over in a cage down under the world.

“There’s no fire,” says Dean, trying to keep his voice calm. “Just a lot of unfriendly goblins with iffy personal hygiene and no fashion sense.” Which is bad enough. “Think you can play along while I try to sweet talk us out of this?”

Sam nods. He swallows, lowers his arm from his face, steps forward to stand beside Dean. Dean can feel minute tremors running through him, but he draws himself up and manages to look convincingly menacing. Especially since everyone round them is three feet tall. Having Sam loom over this crowd is kind of overkill.

Dean turns to the nearest kobold. A woman, he can glimpse the small, brown breasts under her apron. She’s holding a silver hammer.

“Take me to your leader,” says Dean, because he’s always wanted to say that.

The kobold glares at him. “We do not lead or follow,” she says. “I will do. You can speak your piece to me, and all will hear.”

Great, except that doesn’t give Dean much time to retrieve his opening line. _We come in peace?_ Classic, but no. _Took a wrong turn looking for the bathroom, don’t suppose you could point the way out_ likely won’t work either.

“No one wants to get hurt here,” he says instead. “Yeah, you could probably take us. Only two of us, a bunch more than two of you. But we’ve got knives and bullets of cold iron. And there’s people up there will come looking if we don’t make it back. Sooner or later you’ll get smoked out. Best for everyone if we talk.”

“You are talking,” the kobold answers. “But you are saying little. You did not come down here bristling with cold iron to sup bread and milk and share tales. Best for us if we break your kneecaps and leave you.”

“Actually,” says Dean, “Funny you should mention bread and milk.”

He sets down the bag in his hand an arm’s reach away, movements slow and nonthreatening, steps back. The kobold edges forward suspiciously, wrinkles her nose at the rustle of plastic, opens the bag and peers in. Dean holds his breath. Chocolate milk and Wonder Bread. He’s betting his and Sam’s lives on this creature knowing awesome when she sees it.

She gets the cap off the bottle with no trouble, sniffs, flicks out a flat brown tongue to taste. Then she tilts her head back, like a frat boy downing a shot, and chugs the bottle at one go. She throws the empty plastic away, wipes at a messy chocolate moustache with her arm, and sits abruptly cross-legged on the floor.

“Speak," she says.

Dean lets out his breath. Their plan for negotiating had involved a bit more neutral ground and exit strategies, but at least the chocolate milk worked. If they make it out of here they’ll owe Quik. And Sam owes Dean twenty bucks. Dean sits cautiously, mirroring the kobold’s pose, maybe three feet away. Sam stays standing. He’s shifting about a bit, eyes darting, and Dean can smell his sweat. He just hopes he can hold it together long enough to get through this. And that this doesn’t end in broken kneecaps and slow death.

“You got a bunch of pissed off miners up there,” Dean begins. “You’re fucking up their livelihoods, and they’re losing men. Didn’t used to be that way. Seems you and they coexisted just fine till two, three years back. Their machines reach places that your hammers can’t. You keep the tunnels safe, bless the rock – time was this place had the lowest accident rate in the region. Everyone stands to gain, even if the miners don’t know you’re here. We’re wondering what changed. If it’s territory, if you’ve got humans moving in on your turf, we can do something.”

“Maybe,” says the kobold, “Perhaps. But we have lost much. Our lower realms flooded with demons when the Morningstar rose. It is better we no longer share the rest.”

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Dean thwacks Sam’s leg, _be quiet_ , but it’s too late. Sam’s already speaking. Not in his guilty, I-must-take-responsibility-for-my-sins-by-getting-us-killed voice, but in the hollow monotone that means he’s not in the same conversation as anyone else.

“That was me,” he says. “The Morningstar. Lucifer. He was me. I let him out. He took me back with him. We burned together.”

Then he cries out and drops to his knees beside Dean, beating at his own arms, his hair, his crotch. Trying to put out the flames. Dean goes to catch his wrists, but long, bony fingers grab his arms from behind and drag him back. Feels like there are a hundred of them, though when he twists his head it’s only eight kobolds holding him back. They’re a lot stronger than they look. He can’t reach his gun or his knife. He can’t get to Sam. There’s a gnarled kobold hand holding a bronze knife at his throat.

“Sam,” he says. The knife nicks into his neck. He closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to bleed out watching Sam burning.

“Get away from him,” says Sam’s voice. Dean opens his eyes again. Sam has steadied himself on one knee. There’s sweat running down his face in rivers, and his left shoulder is twitching spasmodically, but his right hand is holding the gun perfectly steady. The knife at Dean’s throat withdraws a little.

“Put down your weapons, both of you,” says the kobold woman. She must have got the no lead, no follow thing wrong somewhere, because the bronze knife drops instantly to the stone and the hands holding Dean let him go. Sam’s gun doesn’t waver. Dean edges forward and takes it out of his hand. Sam clutches at him and slumps forward, breathing in great noisy pants like a giant dog. Dean rubs his shoulder. His flannel overshirt is soaked through with sweat.

“So it was you,” says the kobold woman. She’s standing inches away from Sam. Sam lifts his head. He’s back, taking in the cave. His eyes focus on the kobold woman’s and Dean realizes he’s seeing her now, not a flame or empty air.

“Yes,” he says, “I’m sorry.”

The kobold woman laughs.

“Sorry?” she says. “You caged the angel princelings. We are in your debt. Between heaven and hell our realms would be precarious indeed.”

“But I let him out,” says Sam.

“Yes,” says the kobold woman. “It was stupid. Humans often are. So was jumping into the Morningstar’s cage. So was defending your brother just now, nine hundred and thirty to one. You are a marvel of foolishness.”

She turns to Dean.

“We pay our debts, when we can. You may go. We will trouble the miners no further. The passage there will bring you to daylight. Turn always left.” She reaches into the deep pocket of her apron and hands him, of all things, a plastic flashlight. It looks exactly like the one Dean had been holding when the ceiling caved in, the one that was crushed in the rock fall. “Payment for a most unusual draught of milk,” she says. She pokes a gnarled finger at his chest, then turns and walks away into the crowd without a backward glance.

 

Dean’s shaking with faded adrenaline as they climb up the twisting tunnel, turning always left, groping along the wall as they stumble over uneven rock. The flashlight beam wavers, catching black moss and trickles of moisture. And a flicker of movement. Dean steadies the flashlight on it. It’s a bloody great, like, spider thing. And yeah, OK, Dean Winchester has demonstrably faced worse than bloody great spider things, within the last hour or so, even, but ew. He’d almost put his hand on it.

“Jesus fuck,” he says, and steps backwards. Into Sam. Sam edges around him and peers at it.

“It’s just a cave cricket,” he says. “It’s perfectly harmless.”

“It’s a bloody great spider thing,” Dean retorts automatically. Sam sounds exactly like Sam now. None of that strain that gets into his voice when he’s trying to talk over stuff that only he hears, or the monotone that means he’s gone away. He reaches carefully past Dean’s shoulder and picks the damn thing up. Gently, so as not to crush any of its horrible legs. Jesus. Dean should have let the kobold keep Sam, if she liked him so much.

“See,” Sam is saying, in his most annoying lecture tone, “The antennae make it look like it’s got eight legs, but it’s really just six.”

“Sam,” says Dean. Calmly, perfectly calmly. “Put your hideous mutant spider friend down. Now.”

Sam tips the thing reluctantly back onto a spur of rock. It sproings horribly away. Maybe it eats kobolds.

After a while the darkness thins and the flashlight goes dim. They turn a corner and see the mouth of the cave, like the kobold said. It’s raining outside. They stop just under the overhang and lean against the rock.

“Don’t suppose you know where the road is,” says Dean. The view from the cave mouth is woods and more woods.

Sam takes a compass out of his pocket, but he stares like he’s not seeing it.

“I lost it down there,” he says. “I almost got us killed. Those things almost cut your throat. Maybe I should hole up with Bobby. Not go on the active hunts.”

“Dude, it was you who got us out,” says Dean. “That kobold lady totally had a crush on you. She thought you were awesome. She didn’t know about the creepy spiderphilia, of course. Just the saving the world bit.”

Sam just looks worried and resigned.

“It’s an easy mistake to make,” Dean concedes generously, “For goblins who live underground and don’t know you. They see the kickass parts where you put the devil back in his cage and hold a gun straight even when you’re hallucinating. They don’t have to share a car with you on taco night or listen to the stuff you call music. They don’t know what human hair is supposed to look like, or get that Trek is awesome and Wars is just a bunch of dated FX. They’ve never lost toes because you hogged the sleeping bag in Maine in January. They haven’t spent the night waiting for a tow truck on Route Middle of Nowhere because you broke their car, or . . .”

“You barely had frostbite on one toe,” interrupts Sam. He’s always been defensive about the sleeping bag incident. “But that’s not the point. _They_ didn’t almost get killed because I was losing my shit down there. Though seems like they did get screwed when I released Lucifer.” He shoves his hands mulishly deeper in his pockets. The kobolds probably also don’t know jackets aren’t supposed to be stretched out of shape that way.

“Christ, you’re annoying,” says Dean. Sam can’t expect Dean to spend the rest of the day in a cave mouth – probably surrounded by lurking spider cricket things – explaining to Sam exactly how annoying he is. He grabs him instead and kisses him.

Sam makes a little protesting noise, but Dean just pulls him down at a better angle and carries on. Eventually Sam gives up on being stupid. His lips part and his tongue strokes against Dean’s. Then he’s leaning into the kiss and sucking Dean’s tongue like a drowning man gulping air. Dean puts his hands on his shoulders, _slow down_ , and licks into his mouth. Taking his time. Tasting him. Tasting Sam. The Sam who fucked up and the Sam who turned it round. Who kicked Lucifer’s ass back into the cage and saved the world.

Sam breaks the kiss at last. “Arachnophilia,” he says.

“I just, like, wrote you an ode and made out with you, and that’s your response?”

“The love of spiders would be arachnophilia, not spiderphilia. If those had been spiders. And not, as they actually were, crickets.”

“So what would cricketphilia be, genius?”

Sam mumbles shiftily.

“What?” says Dean.

“Whatever-the-Greek-word-for-cricket-is-philia,” snaps Sam. “I’m not a classicist entomologist.”

“Good thing the kobolds didn’t know about your limited vocabulary,” says Dean. “Come on, let’s find the car.”


End file.
